ECHO 21/3/06

Spotted a face from years ago walking through the high street – a woman who sourly dominated a shared house I lived in nearly 10 years ago near Oval – she was in her mid-thirties then, an office manager for a City merchant bank, a job with responsibility and some pressure – then (isn’t if funny how London repeats and never quite lets go of the same kind of people) she got into smoking grass and hash and taking Ecstasy at the weekends, often spending her Friday and Saturday nights at a club called Samsara in The Fridge in Brixton where she would report back tales of being in heaven, full of bliss, accepted; it became something of a religious experience for her every time – but it was an induced one – the rest of the house would live in fear of the week from Tuesday night onward when she would hit the inevitable mind/body crash, the come down – the swing in her mood was polar, she would become surly, angry and volatile; often she would scream and shout at people in the house for no reason, even once for just walking past her bedroom door and making the floorboards creak – she scared the hell out of me and thankfully after suffering it for 18 months I moved out – Seeing her now came as a bit of surprise, though the way she looked now I could have predicted even back then: her face had become a sullen, rubbery thing, worn out, pinched around her eyes and mouth and looking like it had long forgotten how to laugh or smile; her skin had turned the colour of a rotten plum, a kind of puffy red; her gaze was beady and suspicious, she gave daggers to anyone that came close to her on the pavement as if warning that she might explode at them at any given moment – she wore an oversized leopard skin pillbox hat (!) and an overnight leather jacket, which I could not help feeling was reminiscent of a strait-jacket – she did still look as if she had money to burn, there were a lot of accessories hanging from her neck and wrists – but she moved like she was made of wood, stiffly and without much flexibility left – I wondered if the strychnine they used to cut E’s with had finally damaged her spine?